I was inspired by a picture I saw on line of an x-ray of a guy taking a picture, the idea being that I’d put my face on the left half and keep the x-ray skull, hands and camera on the right. So I wrote the photographer explaining what I wanted to do and asked him how much he wanted to use his image. Which I thought was pretty cool.
I got a curt reply saying that he didn’t feel my application was an appropriate use of his work.
OK, whatever.

So being me, I did a SP in the mirror… then searched on-line image banks for bits of x-ray anatomy, and put them all together to make this picture. It wasn’t easy cause especially the hands were not in the position I wanted so had to manipulate the fingers and other various bones and stuff to superimpose on the original SP. I was surprised I actually found an x-ray camera which came up pretty good after enhancing some of the technical bits, and I did some other adjustments to take into account what I was wearing…

SP taken with EOS 5D MkIII + EF 24-105L IS.

I dedicate this image to my long time friend and soul brother Paul Mendrik, best man at my wedding in ‘76… who I’d been out of touch with for 20 years. Through fortunate circumstance we recently rediscovered our karma and he agreed to design my website for the cost of a renewed friendship.

I so love it when priceless gratuities inspire creativity :-)

Bill Funk Photography

Now this is just typical of the stuff that happens to me these days…
So we’re flying out of Montreal last month after grandson Matteo’s baptism. I had like no problem with the window seat and I was really digging the view of the St. Lawrence River at dusk, feeling happy I had my camera in hand… when all of a sudden this skeletal vampire bat flies right up to my cabin window and looks me straight in the eye. Would have hit the frickin roof if my seat belt hadn’t been fastened !!

Having said that, it’s not the first time something skeletal has accompanied me out of Montreal. And probably won’t be the last neither :-)

Background: Canon EOS 5D Mk3, 24-105 L IS (yes, it is Montreal at dusk)
Bat skeleton: From my image 

The Flight Home

One of my favorites. The basic image for this montage was a shot I'd taken of our kitten, OJ, on the earth filled flower pot.

The rat was killed by another cat who dragged it into our house, and on a hunch that I might one day use it, I decided to take it’s picture before giving it a proper burial. Used the same Elinchrom studio flash as with the kitten shot, hanging the rat by it’s tail from a tripod.

Of course, this particular shoot, as well as the subsequent burial in the garden under pouring rain, was done after everyone else had gone to bed :-)

As the idea for the end image began to evolve, I felt some flowers were needed in the pot with the kitten... so I bought a pot of petunias (think that's what they were), and weighed them down with my light meter to simulate the kitten sitting on them. I then isolated the flowers from their original background and the light meter so I could drag them into the image of OJ on the pot.

The rat was also isolated from the original background of its portrait... not easy as I needed to keep the edges of the fur in tact, and was also dragged onto the image. The tail was edited so it fit convincingly in OJ's chops.

All 3 elements - OJ in pot, crushed flowers and rat were put together in Photoshop. Direction of lighting and shadow effects were important to make the collage look realistic.

Only editing aside from merging the selected elements in layers was the shadowing. This was done by selection and feathering of the shadow shapes and dropping the levels and contrast in separate layers.

All elements shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film with a Canon EOS 100 SLR and EF 100mm fixed focal lens. Individual shots scanned to digital with Canon FS 2710 negative scanner, processing in Photoshop 6.0.

Rat Cat

O is for October’s child…
Born for woe,
And life’s vicissitudes must know,
But lay an opal on her breast,
And hope will lull those woes to rest.

- from the Gregorian calendar of birthstones

The faces (there are about 60) are from various photos, mostly of my daughter, born in my favorite month of October. They were blended in with layer blend effects in Photoshop so that the textures of the leaves look like they’re following the contours of the faces. Basic picture is a forest floor in autumn.
Foret de Soignes, near Brussels, Belgium.

All portraits and background shot on film with Canon EOS 100 + various lenses, scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

October's Child

Scratch, our Siamese, photographed with what would on a normal day be his dinner.

Birds were shot at a local pet store and added to the original take of Scratch in the bowl using Photoshop 6.

As the birds were photographed in cages, the bars they were behind had to be cloned out and this took a lot of time and patience. Addition of shadows and ensuring consistency in the direction of light source were important factors to getting the image to look realistic.

All elements shot with a Canon EOS 100 + EF 28-80 USM on Fuji 100 ISO color print film. Negatives scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

Birdpuss

I made this collage from 26 photos taken in various locations - Mountain scene/sky/lighthouse: Cape St. Vincent (Algarve, southern Portugal); ship: Portimao harbor (also Algarve); crow: Painted Desert, Colorado; driftwood: Sanibel, Florida.

Live animals were shot (not literally) at a petting zoo in the Algarve, the water buffalo were ambiotronic robots from the African River Safari at Disney in Orlando. Lightning was shot during a storm from my bedroom window; Human figures on ship were drawn in with Photoshop paint tools.

Lots of time was spent on selecting the elements from their original backgrounds and making sure the lighting on all the elements looked as though coming from the same source.

All elements were shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film on a Canon EOS-100 SLR. The negatives were scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

William's Ark

One of our kittens of years ago, OJ, gazing into a make-up mirror, watched over by curious cockatiel. The bird was photographed in a local pet shop and added with CS3, as was its shadow, the blue color on the wall and an additional shot of the picture on the wall to cover the original. Other edits included level adjustments and a touch of soft focus.
I had to wait till OJ got totally tired before he’d sit still… in the end I had to snap my fingers to get him to open his eyes!

Mirror, Mirror

The image started with a picture of the beautifully melancholic ruins of the ancient abbey at Villers la Ville south of Waterloo, Belgium. I took 3 bracketed shots which I used to create an HDR image (with Photomatix) of the main section.

As I used a wide angle lens to include the vaulted ceiling, I also needed to correct the sloping verticals using the Transform tool in Photoshop CS3.

The water on the floor is from a shot I took on film some years ago at Gibraltar in southern Spain.

The sky through the windows in the back of the abbey was taken from a shot from Flagler Beach in Florida (never know when you’re gonna need a dynamic sky… always like to keep a couple in my library).

The original picture had 6 round windows in the back… I replaced them with a segment of single, larger window from another section of the abbey, just cause it looked cooler.

The birds are from another take of the sky over Flagler Beach. No idea what they are, but as I didn’t have one single shot of vampire bats (which actually surprised me…), I settled for these.

The roots growing up the columns in the foreground were actually growing up the outer wall of the abbey, so I planted them inside digitally and couldn’t believe how quickly they spread.

Finally, the 7th element. Reeled off 60 shots of myself in lots of poses and a couple of different shirts. Did it on the patio with the self timer and totally frustrated the next door neighbor as he could see the set up but I kept myself out of view. If it were me, I would have had the kid kick a football over the hedge and told him to have a good look while he fetched it!

All seven elements used in this collage are my own… All but the water were shot with a Canon 5D MkI and EF 16-35L lens.

Losing My Religion

A few years ago we visited my daughter’s family in Montreal, and I came back to Brussels with a life size, anatomically correct plastic skeleton. Later that year, a photo shoot at our local medieval castle in Beersel, south of Brussels, inspired me to do a collab with my new found skinny friend.

I had a shot of the torture chamber (which wasn't easy to find in the myriad of stairways and turret rooms) that looked like it would suit as a background. I then did some shots of my skeleton outside on the patio at home and in the bedroom in different positions so I’d have options for positioning him in the montage. He was pretty cooperative but got a bit pissy when I told him he wouldn’t get paid. I just told him there was no budget and that seemed to shut him up…

At first I didn’t have a clear idea of what the finished image would be, though the scenario started to evolved as I tried different set ups. Fact is, when I visited that spooky chamber, it was hard not to imagine and actually feel the anguish of torture and executions that happened there in ages past. So I went with that and added some extra elements (like the sword and bondage rings on the walls) to reinforce the story line.

But there was something missing… maybe bats flying round overhead? Of course they needed to be skeletal too, so I searched Google for royalty free bat skeleton images and was totally blown away to find so many to choose from !!
It took an obscene amount of time to isolate all the bones (and that goes for my friend’s as well) from the background images and to position everything and balance the lighting of all the elements. But in the end, and in my own distorted and characteristically bent way, I believe it was worth the pain.

All elements, aside from bats, shot with Canon EOS 5D MkI with EF 100mm fixed focal lens.

Yup, first time I ever used other than my own photos…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35071522@N00/

 at Flickr (cheers mate, you make bat bone attitude rock!)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99411713@N00/

Dawn Execution

What-not shelf with collage of extracts from some of my pictures.

One of my earliest projects in Photoshop that evolved with my learning experience over some months till I was finally satisfied it wouldn't get any better with further tweaks.

I originally shot the shelf at a Brussels flea market with a Canon EOS 100 + EF 28-80 USM on Ilford 400 ISO black & white print film.

Whatnots, all shot on 35 mm print or slide film, were scanned on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner, then digitally isolated from their backgrounds and added to the colored shelf image in Photoshop 4 with lots of shadowing effects and lighting edits.

Whatnot Shelf

Unbelievably, the inspiration for this came from Australian sculpture artist 

 who’s giant lifelike sculpted masks seriously blew me away.
Just hope he’s not too disappointed that this inspiration ultimately led me to something as far removed from museum art as my own take on one of my fave films of all time…

The idea of my face being used as a mask intrigued me to the extent that I found myself doing a series of selfies with my head resting on its side on the toilet seat. Not much I do to get an image surprises me anymore.

It was a total nightmare separating my hair spikes from the background, but I got steadfast with the task and the cut-out mask looked good.

But that’s where I got creatively stuck. What next?

Fortunately we had to take our cat to the vet last Saturday and it occurred to me that a shot of his operating table could be even cooler than Mueck’s marble museum pedestal… just the way my brain works… So I brought the camera along and while the cat got his shot, I got mine…

It was while I was checking out the shots from the vet’s practice that the Hollow Man thing came to me… like this invisible man needed a mask, and fortunately I had just the thing!!

So all I needed was a guy in a hooded jacket without a face (back to the bathroom with the self timer ticking down)…

I then started to put everything together in Photoshop.

It was tough because the layout of the vet’s practice totally didn’t fit my idea of the frame layout, so I had to clone out the window and completely change the layout, and even move that cool X-ray thing over to the other side of the room… which was actually at the same side of the room before I swapped the room around… whew!

And even when I’d taken my face out of the hood and it looked like the image was done, I knew it needed something more… so I slept on it…

and came up with the newspaper article, the pieces of ID, and of course the sunglasses…

It took a while to get everything positioned and blended and there was a shitload of image layers and adjustment layers to keep track of…

But it was fun. Like I hadn’t had in yonks.

Sorry this is so long winded, but when the adrenaline kicks in ya just gotta go with it, yeah?

All elements shot with a Canon EOS 5D MkI with EF 16-35L and EF 100 mm fixed focal lenses.

Hollow Man

Well, not really. It’s been a tough day.
BUT…
It’s not permanent. Just submitted this for a 'meet the members' gallery in an art community site group I'm a member of.

I went for this new look as the requirement was for some kind of processing to be done on the face, and I’d never done texture layers before…
So thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone.
Or rather… let’s burn off all my layers of skin with one vat of sulfuric acid !!!

I found a royalty free high resolution image of some peeling paint in an on-line image bank and tried various Photoshop layer blending modes with a self portrait till I got something that really scared me. Of course, the selfie I started with was already scary enough...

If I scared anyone else I’m really sorry.
If I didn’t, I’m really disappointed :-))

Original SP as well as background sky: Canon EOS 5D MkI, EF 28-80 USM. Layer processing done in CS3.

It's OK Mama...

This is a Photoshop collage of 21 different photos I’d taken in and around the Algarve in southern Portugal. All the originals were done on film, so scanning the negatives and all the selection work took lots of time, as did making sure the source and quality of lighting was similar on all the elements. The house originally had that many windows and doors, but I made them all different to underline one of the most endearing aspects of the local architecture.

Everything was composited including all the people (sunbather on the porch was my daughter :-), horse drawn carriage, and architecture surrounding the house like the wall and steps as well as the birds on the roof.
Oddly enough, the most difficult part was getting the sky to match over the two halves of the image as the background was two different shots under different lighting conditions.

Main building shot in Silves, background is Ferragudo.

Windows Of The Algarve

This was actually my first attempt at digital collage, and one of the first things I ever did in Photoshop… the idea behind this image is what inspired me to learn about digital imaging. This was probably around 1990.

The main shot is off the pier at Flagler Beach, Florida. The guy on the right actually had something on his line that was still in the water. A year later, I shot the Dolphin at an aquatic show in the Algarve, southern Portugal...

In Photoshop 4.0 (!), I positioned the dolphin to follow the gaze of the guy with the cap.
It was impossible to import all the tiny splashes and droplets with the dolphin photo, and I spent many hours cloning these in from a series of selected ones.
Lightning in background was drawn with Photoshop tools.

All elements were shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film on a Canon EOS-100 SLR + EF 28-80 USM. The negatives were scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

Big Fishing

Driving back from work at 1 AM, I passed this chateau like every evening. But this time it was misty and the house was lit up like some vampire ball was going on… and I had my tripod in the trunk so the picture needed to be taken.

I added the walkway to the door, the lighting (from a shot outside my bedroom window) and the face in Photoshop.

The biggest challenge here was getting the lightning and its effect on the surrounding sky 

 the tree branches which were part of the original shot. The only effective way of doing this was by superimposing the lightning shot in a separate layer and carefully erasing the areas where the branches were underneath.

The face was blended in from a selfie I did on a flatbed scanner (see 

) at a later date for a Halloween contest. Contrary to popular believe, scanning your face in this way does not cause impotence. It does however blind you for several seconds. I've actually done stoopider things to enter a photo contest...

All elements (except of course my scanned face) were shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film on a Canon EOS-100 SLR. The negatives were scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

Storm Devil

This image started as a portrait of my daughter. I Used Photoshop’s chrome filter and layer blend mode effects to get the ice look.

In fact, the image in the lower layer was from a shot of Sanibel Beach, Florida, which explains the subtle turquoise and blue tones. The chrome filter always works best in layer blend mode as it’s a monochrome filter (at least in my medieval version of PS it was) and needs color contrasts to make it look convincing. I tried several base images before finding the one that worked best.

The bubbles in the leg were from an old negative I found of a macro of a fizzy drink I did yonks ago, and the drips were one of the splash droplets from my image 

For the wet stain under the foot I just selected an area and decreased the level.

Flames were from a log fire in Portugal, icicles on the head from a Kodak Instamatic shot taken some time in the 80's.

All elements, except for icicles and including the original portrait, shot with a Canon EOS 100 (with various lenses) on Fuji Reala 100 ISO print film. Scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

Ice Girl

I did this image for a calendar (month of January) sponsored by the art community website RedBubble, the proceeds of the sales of which went to the 

 charity for the prevention of blindness.

The MO for the 12 photographers taking part was to make a picture involving yourself wearing a minimum of clothing. I might have taken that a bit too literally…

I’m leaving its original posted description here because it is one of the most intricate collages I’ve ever done, and of course I couldn’t bear not divulging how it was constructed…

Happy New Year… Yer Goin’ to the Moon!

OK guys, here`s my take on the mad month of January… and what better way of calling in the new year than getting naked and sending your cat to the moon? Just shows what kind of dark mischief some of us can get up to when there`s nobody around to keep us out of trouble!

This is a collage made up of 6 separate shots…

I first shot the background scene with the open window, balancing studio flash with the natural light from the kitchen. I figured if anything went wrong, I`d still have an untouched basic shot to fall back on.

I then shut the window, pulled the blind (hey, the neighbors talk!) and ran off a bunch of selfies with the self timer in different poses. I held the rocket in all of these as I knew it had to be pointed out the window and it would have been hard to get my hand in the right position without actually holding it. The part of the string hanging straight down was part of this take.

Next I took a piece of firework fuse (blew me away you could actually buy that by the meter in Brussels!), held it with hot dog tongs over some aluminum foil to save the carpet, and lit it when the self timer counted to zero. The fuse burned really fast so I set the exposure different on 4 takes to make sure I got it right… used 1/60 sec in the end.

The cat was next… and Scratch tried to run away so I knew he`d be great! I held him just above the floor, and as the self timer approached zero, I dropped him…. 8 times! Got some amazing expressions that way, this was the best as he looked back at me saying “you`ve done some crazy shit, but now you`ve just gone f`ing MAD!”

Not really knowing how I was going to “tie” him to the rocket, I made some string shots, having used a marker I`d put on the floor during the original shots of me holding the rocket. Here I used one that I ran upwards with a bow knot that I stuck onto my black camera bag at the height I figured Scratch`s neck would be so it would look as if tied to his collar.

Lastly, the fireworks out the window were taken several years ago during a firework display in the Algarve, Portugal. I did a bit of layer blending so the view through the glass of the closed window frame would maintain a bit of its original reflection.

The difficult stuff being done, it was a blast putting everything together in Photoshop… although there were some tedious bits. “cutting out” the spikes in my hair and the sparks of the burning fuse to blend in with the background was a pain, as was changing the wording on the helium balloon from Happy Birthday to Happy New Year (why can`t you get New Year balloons in May??). I also made sure the light direction was consistent in all the elements and added shadows where necessary. Only other processing was adjusting brightness levels and cloning out some of the dead spiders in the corner behind the radiator. Oh, and I changed the color of the walls and painted the radiator which is actually off-white.

All elements except fireworks were shot with a Canon EOS 5D MkI + EF 28-80 USM. All processing done in CS3.

Happy New Year, Yer Goin' to The Moon!

I actually shot a pellet through the glass, in front of a black paper background in a darkened kitchen. With the camera on timer mode and set to f8 at 1 sec., I shot the pellet when the timer hit zero. A home-made switch made with 2 sheets of metal foil triggered the flash when the pellet hit it through the glass, and so the action was frozen. The one second shutter speed ensured that all the action would be captured, including blur of flying shards. Destroyed 3 glasses to make sure I got at least one good picture, and spent an hour cleaning up the kitchen.

The lightning, from a thunderstorm taken out the bedroom window, was added with Photoshop as was the flashpoint above the pepper. Both the lightning and exploding glass were shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film on a Canon EOS-100 with 28-80 USM lens. The downside of which being that I had no way of knowing how either image would come out until I had the reel developed.

I guess that was one of the reasons why working with film was so exciting at the time… now days we see the result as fast as it shows up on the display. And we maybe don`t waste so many glasses !!

The negatives were scanned to digital on a Canon FS-2710 film scanner and processed in Photoshop 6.0. Text was added with Photoshop editing tools.

Midnight Cocktail

No hidden agenda here. Just a bit of FPF (Floridian Pool Foolery) while staying with my mom in Palm Coast… felt kinda good to chill.

I rarely do anything, and that especially goes for chilling, without the camera near at hand... so I snapped on the wide angle, took off my sunglasses and reeled off 3 bracketed shots with the intention of 'tone-mapping' them into an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image. The process, done in this case with the Photomatix program, uses an algorithm to take the best exposed areas of each of the 3 takes and combines them in a final image. This helps to avoid under- and overexposed areas and at the same time giving the image a unique overall vibe.

Although the tone mapping worked well, the image lacked impact. So I added a shot of my wife's hand holding a strawberry daiquiri, and a shot of my daughter in her teens on a chaise longue. Simply cause I could.

 Know What You Did Last Summer

For the base image I asked the model to flip her head up and triggered the flash at the moment her hair reached mid-flight!

I used the lasso tool in CS2 to select portions of various cat photos, and paste them over areas of the original face that corresponded structurally. I used the luminosity blending mode so the basic color and topography of the original face showed through, but I still had the textured fur of the cat segments in tact.

Features like the mouth and the eyes were done with normal blend mode as these had to be unaffected by the original face. I knew it would be next to impossible to try and import the whiskers, so I drew them with thin white brush strokes, having cloned out areas where bits of the original whiskers were still present.

After lots of final tweaks using adjustment layers for adding shadows and increased light and contrast where necessary, I made several shots of the brass bell in different positions as well as the bowed ribbon, using the same studio flash as for the original portrait… this to make sure the quality and direction of the lighting was compatible.

In Photoshop, I `tied’ the bells to the hair with the ribbon, adjusting the angles and scales to suit their positions in the composition. I put lots of importance in the placement of the bells as this was a major compositional feature within the frame.

All elements shot with a Canon EOS 100 + EF 28-80 USM on Fuji 100 ISO color print film. Negatives scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film
scanner.

Boo !!

Just a bit of fun. One of the first montages I did in Photoshop, when our daughter was in her early teens… I’d done so many portraits of her and her friends that I had an infinite supply of eyes noses and mouths to use in some kind of weird collage.

It started with a picture of a window with colored glass panes I took in a hotel stairway somewhere in Germany in the early 90’s.

The idea was there was this factory making girls… and my daughter (peering through the broken pane) was helping all the facial parts to escape.

OK. I never said I didn’t have a serious affliction. It’s just the way I’ve always rolled and fortunately my family has grown to deal with it.

All elements shot with a Canon EOS 100 with various lenses, on Fuji Reala 100 ISO print film.

Scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner. All processing, including the broken glass pane, done in Photoshop 4.

Girl Factory

I did some shots of daughter Melanie (then in her late-ish teens) after she’d had her hair done and started messing around in PS adding some more curls… and as it was around Christmas time, I thought maybe some holly would look cool, so I went out and bought some and shot it with the same flash set-up as the portrait. I added the holly in PS, but thought it was missing something to finish it off… so came the idea of the candle, which I also shot with the same setup and thought it fit nicely into the curls.

I decided to add a "Merry Christmas" text and put the picture on our Christmas cards to friends and relatives that year and was totally blown away to find out how many of them thought I’d actually put a burning candle in her hair. I guess that was a sort of compliment that it looked so real? Anyway, I can confirm that no daughters lost their hairdo during the making of this picture...

Canon EOS 100 + EF 100 mm fixed focal on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film.

Two Elinchrom 250 Watt studio flashes, each with 60 x 60 cm softbox.

Christmas Curls

I work in a recording studio and the French reggae group Sinsemilia were posing in a vintage T-Bird in the parking lot. I used Photoshop to put them in the Painted Desert with a couple of crows from the Rocky Mountains and a no-swimming sign from the Florida Everglades. The bumper reflected the cobble stones from the parking lot so I had to clone in some desert floor to make it plausible. The Belgian license plate was changed to spell the title of their album, 

, pronounced too-skon-ah (meaning “all we’ve got”)

I made it a square format so they could use it for their CD cover, but alas, even though they really dug the picture, they’d already arranged the artwork. Grin & bear it...

All elements shot with Canon EOS 100 + EF 28-80 USM on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film.

Bill Funk

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